by Dan Moren
Jony has left the building
The Verge reports that Jony Ive’s profile has been removed from Apple’s leadership page, marking the end of his official tenure at the company, which was announced earlier this year.1
Ive’s successors, Evans Hankey and Alan Dye, both report to the company’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams, but this does mean that for the first time in a long time, the company has nobody on its leadership page representing product design. (In fact, the word “design” appears nowhere on the leadership page anymore.)
Of course, Ive isn’t necessarily wholly gone from the company on which he’s had such a major impact: part of the announcement of his departure was that he was forming an independent design firm of which Apple would be a client. But, though his influence may still be felt, it seems likely that others will be making the final word on product design decisions. It’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out over the next few years.
- It also doesn’t seem like chance that the company made this move on Thanksgiving, a day on which it’s likely that nobody’s paying any attention to news, especially when it’s so quietly done. ↩